


Bedbugs

by diadelphous



Category: American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence/General Messed-up-ness, F/F, Ghost Sex, Reference to Eating Disorders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:07:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2789420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadelphous/pseuds/diadelphous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ghost of Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exception Young Ladies haunts entertains herself one night as the house is sleeping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bedbugs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellabaloo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellabaloo/gifts).



She lets the house do most of the talking these days, and Miss Robichaux’s hasn’t let her down. That creaky old voice of all old houses, the echoes in the stairwell like footsteps. It works. You’d think a bunch of baby witches wouldn’t let themselves get scared by the fucking foundation settling but she hears them after she’s done the rounds, shrieking and giggling, whispering that it’s the ghost of Miss Robichaux herself, keeping watch over her daughters.

She ripples when she hears that, annoyed. She’d roll her eyes if she still had them. They always think it’s Miss Robichaux but Miss Robichaux is a painting on the wall and dust on the ground; she evaporated out of this world long ago. Not like her. The real ghost of Miss Robichaux’s Academy, forced to stick around for reasons unfathomable. That’s the way it is with magic, she learned when she was alive. You think you understand it but you don’t. You can’t. Otherwise, it’d just be science.

Now that she’s kicked it, she’s learning things about being dead, too. Being dead isn’t like magic. You can understand it just fine. Her body’s gone and now she’s thinner than she ever thought possible: literally just molecules on the air that’ll shimmer if you turn the corner at the right time, or if the moonlight catches on her at the right angle. She knew some girls back in Hollywood who were killing themselves to get like this, pills and water and cigarettes and little strips of lettuce like the kind you feed rabbits. Sometimes she thinks about those girls, wonders if they ever got what they wanted, this transcendent thinness. Only if they had a reason to stick around, she supposes.

She hasn’t been dead long. Time runs differently when you’re dead anyway, since you’re dealing with all of eternity rather than a lifetime, which is just a blink of the eye of the universe—she can’t remember where she heard that, some scientist on TV, maybe, or the yogi she used to see before she came to Miss Robichaux’s. But she’s got the real world to act as her clock, and things at Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies haven’t changed that much. Okay, there are more students, sure. And Cordelia’s the supreme—who the fuck saw that coming? The smart phones are flashier; the girls are wearing cat-eye liner, their hair in long cascading waves.  But Zoe’s still around. Kyle, too. And they haven’t aged.

She wants them to age. Wants them to droop and sag and fall apart while she stays transparent on the air, the image of her youth implanted in everyone’s memories. She will stay preserved in time and they will rot away into the soil.

Perfect. It’s only fair. She remembers what they did to her. There are some things she doesn’t remember—like what she looked like _exactly_ , she knows she was beautiful but she can’t remember if her hair was dark or pale, if her beauty was classic or seductive or girl-next-door, and she can’t remember her name, either, which is annoying as hell—but she does remember dying. Remembers that little shit Kyle’s hands on her neck, collapsing her trachea. Remembers the air strangling in her lungs. All because of _Zoe_. Zoe! It’s not fair that she can remember _her_ name. She’s glad to remember Kyle’s, glad to remember her killer because that makes her ghostly rage all the sweeter, but Zoe? Zoe was nothing. She didn’t even have the decency to become the next supreme, for God’s sake.

And yet she can remember Zoe’s name. Zoe still has that much power. Some nights, on full moons when she’s at her strongest, she lets the house get to creaking and she stretches out on the velvet sofa in the drawing room, and she tries to remember her name. At first it was just _zoezoezoezoezoezoe_ over and over in her head like a birdsong, and she knew that wasn’t right. But she kept thinking and other names started drifting in, ones she recognized—Nan and Fiona and Marie. And she dismissed all of them. Now, though, the names seem like they might work. She tries them on the way she used to try on ball gowns, to see how they fit. Suzie. Regina. Christy. Kirsty. Joan.

No, no. None of those will do. 

* * *

 

Nighttime. Waxing moon. Her strength is starting to build up again—she can feel a prickle in the place where her heart would have been, if she still had a body. She drifts upstairs. Miss Robichaux’s is silent, the girls all tucked away in their beds. It’s a school night, and they’re behaving themselves. She slips into her old bedroom. They’ve got the girls doubled up in there, dorm room style. Enough students for it these days. One of the girls is a little wisp of a thing, her pale hair transparent in the moonlight. She scares easily. That’s why it’s fun to lean in close to her and blow a thin stream of frozen breath into her ear.

The girl shrieks and sits up. She looks around wildly, then pulls her blankets up under chin. Her roommate sleeps on. That one doesn’t scare as easily.

“Go to sleep,” the ghost says, and then she laughs, although her laughter doesn’t sound like laughter anymore, but the wind howling across an empty field, like tree branches tapping against glass.

“Wh—Who’s there?” the girl squeaks.

The ghost doesn’t answer. This is starting to bore her. It was just meant to be a warmup. Wouldn’t want to strain herself as she comes into her strength.

She slips out of the room. The hallway looms in front of her. She feels ready. But who will start it off tonight: Zoe or Kyle?

_Zoezoezoezoe_ whispers that voice in the back of her thoughts, and she hushes it. _That’s not my fucking name!_

Kyle, then, she’ll start with Kyle. He’s up in the attic room, where Zoe keeps him tucked away like a toy. The ghost doesn’t bother with the stairs this time, just floats straight up through the ceiling. Kyle’s room always calls to her, a echoing sing-song. Not because of _Kyle_ —her murderer doesn’t have that much power. It’s because of when she died the first time, when she wasn’t a ghost. Something happened in this room, and the psychic memory lingers like the aftertaste of a cheap cigarette.

No matter, though. It’s worth the discomfort coming up here to play with Kyle. He’s sleeping in his tiny cot bed, snoring a little. Naked underneath the sheets. She drifts over close to him and watches him for a moment. His hands are tucked under his ear, like a little kid play-acting at being asleep. His hands: his murder weapon of choice. He touches Zoe with those hands—Madison sees them, watches them sometimes, when he creeps down to Zoe’s room and crawls into her bed and pulls the silky nightgown away from her shoulders. His filthy hands all over her body. It’s not fair that he gets to touch her, and _she_ , the ghost, is trapped in the molecules of the air where all she can do is watch and remember what it was like when she was still alive, when she could still feel skin on skin. Now she can not touch, or taste, or feel, not really. But she can play.

She flutters over Kyle as he lays sleeping. The moonlight filters through the curtains covering the dusty window, giving her a burst of strength. She slips herself into his brain, entering through his ear, so she can plant seeds inside his dreams.

His dreams are always strange: the dreams of five different boys. They’re all broken into pieces. Every time she comes in here, it’s like peering through the world’s ugliest kaleidoscope. Broken black glass, plants dying on a rotting southern porch, sorority girls passed out drunk on a cheap couch, blood-red sports car driving too fast down a curving road. She drops her seeds as she wanders the landscape. They are hard and black and rough against her fingers—in the dream she has a body, although she can never see it herself. The body is how Kyle sees her, and she doesn’t know what she looks like to him. If she is beautiful, if she is dead.

It doesn’t take much for the seeds to grow, and she sticks around for a few moments, dream-time, to watch them unfurl. She cooked up some good ones this time. Zoe, a whole army of Zoes, all of them dead. All of them with marks around their necks, marks that follow the pattern of fingerprints, red and livid. The Zoes scream and beg him to stop. _No Kyle, no, how can you kill meeeeee?_

In her dream-body, the ghost smiles. Kyle’s brain rattles around her. _No no no,_ he says, and she can taste tears at the back of her throat. _No no no_.

She leaves to let the Zoes do their work. She drifts back out into the waking world and glances down at Kyle. He’s not sleeping so peacefully now. Sweat shines on his skin. The blanket has twisted around his feet. “No,” he mumbles. “No, no, not Zoe, I didn’t mean—” And then a strangled cry that fills the ghost with warmth.

She has one more stop tonight. 

* * *

 

Zoe has kept her room from the days when Miss Robichaux’s only had a handful of students, from the days when they didn’t have to bunk together, from the days when the ghost was alive. Zoe left her curtains open before she fell asleep, and the moonlight pours into the room, infusing the ghost with strength. She drifts over to Zoe’s bed and watches her. Zoe is so very much alive. Her cheeks are pink, her chest rises and falls with her breath. The ghost leans in close, trying to sense the warm blood pumping in Zoe’s veins. Zoe murmurs in her sleep and pulls the blanket up around her chin. No matter. There are other ways to feel alive.

The ghost drifts down closer to Zoe, close to Zoe’s lips. She enters through Zoe’s mouth, like a kiss, pulling herself up into the dreamscape where Zoe’s nighttime thoughts dwell.

She’s dreaming of the swamp. Cypress trees stretching out of black water, insects buzzing in the humid air. Lights drift by—fireflies or will-o-the-wisps or some other fragments of Zoe’s consciousness. The ghost doesn’t care. She’s here for Zoe, and she seeks her out, moving through the morass of the swamp. Her dream-body is barefoot. Slimy mud crawls up around her ankles, her bare legs. Perhaps she’s naked in this dream. That is often how Zoe thinks of her.

The swamp curls in on itself. White mist drifts out of the thick water. And through that mist the ghost sees her: Zoe, shrouded in white gauze and silk, holding liquid light in her hands.

“Hello,” the ghost says.

Zoe looks up at her. Gasps. The light from her hands is gone.

“You,” she says, and her voice is far away.

In her dream-body, the ghost smiles. She runs a hand over her side—yes, she’s naked, her skin cool beneath her touch. Naked and not quite dead, here in the dream world.

“What do you want?” Zoe says.

“You know what I want,” the ghost says.

The dream changes, the way things do in dreams. Zoe is at her side now. The fabric of her dress has changed, too; it is thin and transparent and the ghost can see the shadow of Zoe’s breasts. She takes Zoe by the hand and pulls her close and kisses her, running her long fingers over the curve of Zoe’s waist. Zoe does not struggle; she does not pull away. Oh, she wants to, and the ghost can feel her reticence, her fear. But she does not want to, either, and that is why Zoe keeps kissing her, keeps pressing her body against the ghost’s, in this one place where the ghost can have a body. Zoe’s heat is overwhelming. The ghost moves her hand lower. Lifts up the ragged hem of Zoe’s dress. It crumbles at her touch. Zoe moans and throws her head back, revealing the pulse of her neck. The ghost kisses that pulse, tastes that life living there in the pumping of Zoe’s blood. _Life._ She moves her hand over Zoe’s hips, down between her legs. Zoe cries out.

They are on the ground now, Zoe on her back, legs parted, the mud of the swamp sliding over her skin. The ghost remembers where to lick, where to kiss, where to slip her fingers in, one at a time. They did this when she was alive, Kyle forgotten on the side of the bed, Zoe screaming in pleasure. Zoe’s screaming in pleasure now. Her screams change the air of the swamp, turning it cool and sweet. Her screams bring the stars out. The ghost smiles as continues to kiss and explore. The swamp wraps around them.

This is as close to the living as she will ever be. 

* * *

 

The next morning the ghost feels fainter than usual. Partially it’s the sunlight, which always turns her weak and transparent—the opposite of moonlight. But also it is the memory of the dream, of there vitality there, in sharp contrast with the reality of her afterlife.

She drifts down to the dining room. It’s quiet—the students haven’t woken yet, but she knows they’ll start trickling down soon enough, in pairs and trios, sleeping-eyed and bleary-faced. The teachers are up, though. Queenie flips through the newspaper that is inexplicably left on the front porch every morning. Cordelia is one room over, in the parlor, talking on the phone in a quiet murmur. An interview, probably, drawing attention to the school. Cameras and flashbulbs. The ghost remembers what that’s like, to be the center of attention.

And Zoe.

Zoe sits across the table from Queenie. A mug of coffee steams in front of her but she doesn’t touch it, even though her eyes are sunk deep in her skull and her hair is lank and messy from a night tossing and turning.

Queenie rustles the paper. Peers up over the top edge.

“You’re freaking me out,” she says.

Zoe blinks, shakes her head. “What?”

“Tough night?” Queenie sets the paper down next to her own coffee.

“I guess,” Zoe says, and the ghost wishes it was still possible for her to laugh—a proper laugh, not a ghost-laugh.

Footsteps approach from the kitchen. Zoe jerks up her head, like a deer or a rabbit or some other animal vulnerable to predators. Queenie turns back to the newspaper.

It’s Kyle, disgustingly handsome in his dark suit. He carries two silver platters both piled high with the day’s breakfast. The ghost settles down in a cool, dark corner. _Finally_. She’s been wondering when he would show up.

Kyle looks at Zoe as he moves across the dining room. She doesn’t look at him, though, but at the surface of her coffee. _You want to see the future, you look at tea leaves, not coffee_ , the ghost thinks.

Kyle sets the platters on the table. Queenie glances up from her newspaper, glances back down. The ghost can’t smell the food, but after last night she skirted close enough to the living world that she almost remembers the scent of sausages and pancakes and maple syrup. Almost. But she is still dead.

Queenie grabs an orange off the fruit platter and picks at the peel with her fingernail. Kyle keeps staring at Zoe. The tension crackles between them, and the ghost knows they are both thinking about their dreams, those late night gifts.

Kyle moves closer to Zoe. Stops. Hesitates. Steps back to where he started. If Zoe noticed, she gives no indication. A wall has grown up between them in this moment, and although the ghost knows it won’t last, that in the bright sunlight, the dreams will move to the back of their consciousnesses—not forgotten, not exactly, but dormant. And they will speak again, they will teach other, they will laugh. But none of that will change the fact that for a few long moments this morning the ghost exerted a force on the world of the living.

Dreams are a powerful magic.

The ghost slips into the walls of the house, away from the weakening effect of the sunlight. She thinks of names, her favorite daytime game: Sally? Sandra? No, not quite right.

Evelyn?

Allison?

Madison?

The names cycle through her thoughts. She relishes the weight of them. She waits for one to be the right fit.


End file.
